Success Story

Customer

croit GmbH offers its customers a cost-efficient, reliable, easy-to-use, scalable and flexible storage solution. Among other things, it achieves this through a storage architecture that separates the storage software from the hardware (software-defined storage). It primarily relies on two open source technologies: Ceph and DAOS.

TOP 10 technology companies
Deloitte awarded croit GmbH with the 10th place of the fastest growing technology companies in Germany. croit creates solutions with well-known partners like AMD, Intel, Seagate or KIOXIA. In addition, croit 2023 has therefore been awarded as TOP 100 Innovator.

Project Timeframe: 2020 - 2024
Project Volume: ca. 2.700.000€

Outlook
More major Ceph and DAOS projects are already in the works for 2024 alone.

Project description

croit offers its software not only for existing systems, but also as complete solutions with corresponding hardware for its end customers. With the help of their software, a flexible, highly available, self-healing and high-performance scale-out storage infrastructure is created.

Let's go through these terms one by one. The systems can therefore:

• be flexibly expanded by means of new modules (scale-out storage or horizontally scalable storage system in German) (flexibility),
• guarantee operation with a high probability (> 99.99%) even if one of their components fails (high availability), and
• automatically detect any data errors, for example after the failure of a component, and independently restore the previous state without interrupting operation (self-healing). In addition
• the DAOS solution with more than 6 TB/s bandwidth makes it to the first place in the IO500 benchmarks as the fastest solution in the world (high performance).

Project realization

As always, personalized solutions for a variety of customer requirements and their performance profiles have been created through cooperation with our MUSTANG Systems team. For croit alone, approx. 200 server systems have now been individually adapted, assembled, delivered and supported. In addition, there are about 120 further systems for co-location as well as university projects.

How are the systems for croit Ceph environments structured?
Essentially, the croit Ceph environments and other customer and software profiles consist of three hardware components:

• HDD storage nodes,
• AllFlash NVMe storage nodes and
• Management Nodes.

This breakdown already shows that a Ceph cluster has management nodes on the one hand and storage nodes on the other. Among other things, the management nodes provide the operating system for the software and monitor the system.

The storage nodes, on the other hand, perform several tasks: Three or five so-called MON (monitor) services are set up. These monitor the status of the cluster and the data at all times. In addition, OSD (Object Storage Daemon) are used for all storage media. These process the requests and ensure data security. In addition, there are all currently widespread storage protocols (S3, NFS, SMB, iSCSI, NVMe-oF, etc.), which can be operated as a service on the same or, if necessary, separate server systems.

Overall, this design helps achieve both intelligent storage and a degree of hardware independence, as well as the flexibility, high availability, self-healing, and high-performance characteristics described above.

What technology was used?
For the HDD storage nodes, we opted for configurations customized according to the requirements based on a Supermicro SuperServer platform for single CPU AMD EPYC 7002/7003 series (including 12x Seagate Mach.2 SAS HDDs), because these processors are particularly energy efficient and thus reduce energy costs.

For the AllFlash NVMe storage nodes, the highly flexible Supermicro AllFlash U.2 NVMe storage servers, Supermicro A+ Server 1114S-WN10RT are used.

Lastly, for easy and flexible management of the environment, the Supermicro 1014S-WTRT is used.

By the way: why croit DAOS systems are based on Intel Xeon Scalable CPU architectures.
Persistent Intel® Optane™ Memory (PMem) is a high-performance byte-addressable solid-state memory on the memory bus that can be used on Intel® Scalable platforms of the latest generations. Due to its positioning on the memory bus, PMem has data access similar to DRAM. This significantly increases the data or system performance of a DAOS environment with unmatched bandwidths of more than 400 Gbit/s and 6 TB/s per cluster.

Supermicro AllFlash U.2 NVMe storage servers 120U-TNR/220U-TNR incl. Intel Xeon Scalable of the 3rd generation as well as enterprise NVMe with up to 30.72TB U.3 NVMe devices are currently used for the DAOS systems of different performance classes and storage volumes (entry to high end performance and volumes).

Why Ceph and DAOS Storage Management from croit?

• Cost-efficient due to open source and vendor neutrality
• Future-proof and flexible without vendor lock-in
• Customizable with user-friendly interface
• Round-the-clock support to ensure your operation
• Consulting and training so you can focus on your core business